I’ve spoken to a number of people and thought a lot about President Bush’s recent round of analogies about the Iraq War — the latest of course being to the Korean and Vietnam Wars (see video of the key passages from the president’s speech yesterday). To get a grasp on an argument, to support it or take it apart, requires that it have some grounding in reality or actual fact. But like so much else that comes out of the White House (and has in recent years) what we have here are arguments which either completely disregard most of the relevant facts or just as often build points on the basis of ridiculous strawman arguments.

Like for instance, all those war critics who think that if only US troops would leave Iraq, all the killing would stop.

Have you met these people? You can find people who think the Earth is flat. Heck, you can even find people who don’t believe in evolution. Most of them seem to be running for president as Republicans. But I don’t think I know anyone who thinks all would be swell in Iraq if only US troops would leave. Indeed, the premise of most current criticism of the war is that we’re occupying a country that is in the midst of a slow-motion civil war and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it and that we should stop trying.

All that aside though what I find most telling about the current round of arguments is the president’s increasingly explicit use of ‘stab in the back’ rhetoric as the new basis of his policy.

Our troops are seeing the progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they’re gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here’s my answer: We’ll support our troops, we’ll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed.

I guess ‘pull[ing] the rug’ is a kinder, gentler Americanized version of ‘stab in the back’. But the core message is the same. There are the troops on the one hand and their domestic enemies at home. And who will win? Andrew Sullivan has a good post on this today. Also look at Jon Chait’s piece in The New Republic on Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard.

Militarism and proto-fascist thinking isn’t just something to be studied about the 1920s and 1930s. You can see it today as a growing part of our political discourse, even as the support for it in absolute terms diminishes. It is all of a piece. You cannot separate the bogus war for democracy abroad from the war against democracy and the rule of law at home.

Fox News signs on to plan to help the GOP steal electoral votes in California.

From Pew …

Sen. Hillary Clinton is by far the most popular presidential candidate among her own party’s voters, but has among the lowest overall favorable ratings of the leading candidates. In sharp contrast, the front-running Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, evokes relatively modest enthusiasm from the GOP base, but is as broadly popular with all voters as any candidate in either party.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Aug. 1-18 among 3,002 adults, finds that 55% of voters who offer an opinion of Clinton express a favorable view of her, while 45% have an unfavorable opinion. Other leading presidential candidates, including Clinton’s Democratic rival Barack Obama (64%), have much higher overall favorability ratings.

Yet Clinton is highly popular with her own Democratic base. Nearly nine-in-ten Democratic voters (88%) who offered an opinion of Clinton express a positive view – with 38% saying they have a very favorable opinion. That is the highest percentage that any of the seven 2008 candidates tested – Democrats or Republicans – receives from their parties’ voters.

Giuliani finds himself in a very different position than Clinton. His overall favorability rating is 10 points greater than Clinton’s (65%). But he lags behind Clinton – and his GOP rival Fred Thompson – in popularity among his own party’s voters: 84% of Republican voters have a positive impression of Giuliani, but just 21% say they have a very favorable opinion.

Here’s a rather bizarre little snippet from Bermuda’s Royal Gazette newspaper …

US Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has pledged to protect Bermuda’s international businesses if he is successful in his White House bid. The Arizona Senator, who spent three days on the Island this week meeting business and political leaders, said he understood the concerns of the insurance and reinsurance sectors about draft legislation proposing a clampdown on US business operations in so-called tax havens.

I understand the US political market has not been working out to well. But he’s campaigning in Bermuda? To help protect their tax haven status?

Recently Barack Obama caught hell from across the political spectrum when he said he’d authorize attacks on high-level terrorists in Pakistan even without approval from the Pakistani government. But now, according to documents obtained by the AP, it seems rules of engagement from 2004 authorized Army Rangers units to undertake cross-border raids into Pakistan in pursuit of suspected terrorists.

Another senior Justice Department official resigns.

The dream of a Biden-Kucinich-Gravel debate slips through our fingertips. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about Mitt Romney’s personal history revisionism, and today we’ve got yet another example for you. Romney on Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), with whom he worked closely as Massachusetts Governor to pass the state’s 2006 health care bill: friend… or foe? Let’s go to the video tape!

Late Update: Election Central has more, including a response from the Romney camp.

Perhaps there’s something wrong with me. But Jim Hoagland’s column in Friday’s Post seems remarkably lucid and well-reasoned. I’d quibble with a few points. There are a few others where I don’t know the details well enough to judge. But on the main outlines I think he’s got it right on the president’s speech comparing Iraq to America’s mid-20th century wars in Asia.

I was going to excerpt this or that portion. But there’s too much. It’s worth reading the whole thing — especially as a riposte to the farcical column by Charles Krauthammer, who argues that the stars are now aligned for a grand bargain, in which war critics confess to the military success of the surge and warmongers blame everything that has gone wrong on Mr. Maliki.

And another word on Mr. Maliki. Hoagland writes …

The need to protect the White House, the Pentagon and both major political parties from greater Iraq fallout explains much of the blame being dumped on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at this late date — even though his deficiencies and close links to Iran and Syria were clearly visible when the administration helped install him in the job in 2006.

That sounds about right, though I suspect the problem runs much deeper. There have been three post-war Iraqi Prime Ministers (though under different degrees of sovereignty and foreign rule): Allawi, Jafaari and Maliki. Do we really believe the problem here is Maliki? We’ve just got the wrong technocrat? The man lacks true leadership stature?

Judged from the outside at least it looks clear that the problem is the fractured nature of the Iraqi state, if you can even call it a state. No mystery here — all the basic divisions we hear about. And his government exists at the sufferance of factional leaders who see his generally impotent administration as a convenient holding pattern under which to secure or expand their own control over regions of the country or sectors of the population.

Along these lines let me give in and quote three of Hoagland’s paragraphs. By using his Vietnam analogy …

Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms — whatever those terms are at any given moment.

That is, the administration has constantly shifted its goals in Iraq to avoid accepting failure and blame — only to see the new goals drift beyond reach each time. Liberation of Iraqis became occupation by Americans, democracy became an unattainable centralized “national unity” government and this year’s military surge has become a device for achieving political reconciliation among people who do not want to reconcile.

Bush’s appeal to Americans to turn away from “the allure of retreat” centered on the indisputably horrific consequences for the people of Vietnam and Cambodia of defeat in 1975. But his analogy also summons the historical reality that U.S. involvement in Indochina became untenable when that engagement itself became a threat to America’s social fabric and national cohesion — and then to the very institutions that had responsibility for the war, the U.S. military and intelligence services, as well as the presidency and Congress.

And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.

By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on. Whatever happens, we’ll recover from it. And whatever might happen, there are things that matter much more to this country’s future — like whether we have a functioning military any more, whether our economy is wrecked, whether this country tears itself apart over this catastrophe. But we’ll go on and look back at this and judge what happened.

Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He’s not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq. Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like. For the president a one in a thousand shot at some better outcome is well worth it, no matter what the cost. Because at least that’s a one in a thousand shot at not ending his presidency with the crushing verdict history now has in store. It’s also worth just letting things keep on going as they are forever because, like Micawber, something better might turn up. Going double or nothing by expanding the war into Iran might be worth it too for the same reason. For him, how can it get worse?

And when you boil all this down what it comes down to is that the president now has very different interests than the country he purports to lead.

Now that he’s been fired, surge supporter Gen. Peter Pace, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will recommend withdrawing almost half of U.S. combat forces in Iraq by 2008.